With an LA prostitute and her rich, handsome client as its central characters, Pretty Woman was an unlikely romantic comedy. But as cinema box offices around the world proved, the Cinderella fantasy totally eclipsed the grim storyline. Now, 10 years on, Richard Gere and Julia Roberts have teamed up again with director Garry Marshall to make Runaway Bride.
Although they had both approached Marshall before with individual projects, he says, this was the first time they'd found a script that they believed could repeat the success of Pretty Woman. Marshall needed little persuasion. The script was great and the timing was right. Far from being a re-run, Runaway Bride would be entirely different, he believed, because the actors were now entirely different, both having gone through difficult times in their private lives over the intervening years.
"I love the combination of emotion and comedy coming together at the same time," says Marshall, when we meet in his London hotel. "That's been my trademark. When I hired Julia for Pretty Woman, "she wasn't the star she is today, she was unknown. There were things I could have done with her in that part, but I didn't. So she trusted me.
"So did Richie. He thought he couldn't do comedy, but I showed him that he could."
In Runaway Bride Gere plays Ike Graham, a cynical columnist who trades on his male readership's inherent belief in the fickleness of women. Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a small-town girl whose predilection for leaving prospective husbands at the altar unleashes a violent diatribe from the world-weary journalist. And, hey presto, the scene is set, but no prizes for guessing the outcome. Garry Marshall believes in fairy tales. His family were first generation Italian/American - his real name is Marschelli. Although he started his working life as a reporter on the New York Daily News, his career in journalism didn't last long. His mother was a dance teacher and, from early on, show biz felt like his natural home.
He tried a bit of everything, from standup comedy, to playing drums in his own jazz band and writing scripts for TV classics including I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyck Show. It was as a writer/producer that Marshall wrote his own fairytale with a string of TV comedies that would become classics: including Mork and Mindy, which gave Robin Williams his big break, and the unforgettable Happy Days with Henry Winkler and Ron Howard.
There is an edge to Marshall's comedy that cuts the saccharine which over recent years has tended to diminish the masochistic pleasure of the great romantic comedies, as witnessed in his film that followed Pretty Woman, Frankie and Johnny with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino.
This time the edge is provided by a wonderful supporting cast, a stable of Marshall regulars whose 24-carat ensemble work ensures that the emphasis is firmly on the comedy rather than the romantic. Runaway Bride marks Hector Elizondo's 10th film with Marshall - he was nominated for an Oscar for his hotel manager in Pretty Woman.
All the rest, bar Joan Cusack (twice Oscar nominee for Working Girl and In & Out with Kevin Klein), are Marshall veterans. Rita Wilson goes back to Happy Days, Jane Morris was the funny waitress in Frankie and Johnny. "All these people I've worked with before, so I can make almost any scene somehow funny."
The script was not sacrosanct. "I build on what I see around me, picking up clues from off-screen behaviour," he says. Roberts the fitness queen is given free rein with Maggie's unnerving prowess at kick boxing.
Gere the musician is similarly outed when Marshall has Ike improvising with the locals, including Marshall's own son, Scott - in reality the film's second unit director.
Most endearing, however, is Marshall's capturing of Roberts the vulnerable, an example of the total trust she has in her director. "I'd seen her do what she called her duck-billed platypus face with kids visiting the set. It's hard for someone as famous as Julia. But kids are different - they don't know who she is and for her that's great. She's wonderful with kids. I saw her pull this face to make them laugh. So, there was this scene between Julia and Joan Cusack that was very important, about the nature of true friendship, the heart-to-heart between the pretty girl and her friend who is not so pretty. It was great, but I knew it needed something more.
"So, after we'd finished the scene, I asked her to pull this face. I didn't give her any time to think about it - I just said, do it, and if you don't like it, then OK. So she agreed. At the end of the scene, you hear her say to Joan Cusack, `God, this is so humiliating.' What she actually said was `God this is so humiliating, Garry.' I just cut the Garry. But it worked."
Nor did Gere escape Marshall's crusade to get something more from his stars. "Richie is rather shy, and not used doing comedy or ad-libbing. Sometimes he needs a bit of persuasion. The great thing is he's comfortable with Julia and trusts her. Julia has always adlibbed but now they do it together."
Because all three were heavily committed elsewhere, the shooting schedule was incredibly tight and the scenes in the Maryland location were shot over two weeks last autumn - beautiful to look at, but a nightmare for continuity.
Marshall remembers his horror on discovering that in less than 24 hours, a field they had shot on the night before had changed colour from green to gold. There was no alternative but to spray it green, he says. Although it was moonlight and cue for clinch, Marshall knew he needed something to "cut the schmaltz".
"I told Richie I wanted him to run across the field. Why, he said. He needed motivation. Julia suggested snakes - so we put that in. But he wasn't sure how to run across a field of snakes. So I just said, OK, imagine the paint on the grass is still wet and you're trying not to get it on your pants." And that's how you get to see Richard Gere running like you've never seen him run before.
Runaway Bride opens in cinemas nationwide next Friday.